This invention relates to the evaluation of telephony call centre performance. In particular it relates to an application that improves the ability of the call centre manager to evaluate the usage of resources in a call centre.
A call centre can be defined as a place in a company or business that handles incoming and/or outgoing calls from/to its customers in support of its day-to-day operation. This can be a telemarketing area, where the employees make outgoing calls to try and sell the company""s products. It can be a service area that receives incoming calls from its customers for repair or maintenance of the company""s goods or services. A call centre will have a telephone system which may be as simple as a small single-line phone, increasing in complexity up to a large multi-node PABX. A call centre would normally have a computerized system for tracking, logging and recording call details, although some simply use paper forms. It may have one operator or agent, or it may have many, depending on the size of the company or business.
With caller demand for telephony call centre functions increasing, an important task for call centre managers is to optimize the use of their existing call centre to squeeze as much performance out of it as possible. One existing tool, described below, provides a useful aid to call centre managers. A known reporting tool for call centre managers monitors the call activity of agents in an Advanced Call Distribution (ACD) group and provides statistical information about any extension monitored by the telephony system. The data collected by the tool can be used to generate the sample reports included with the package, or to create customized reports. The reporting tool analyzes the event data and writes the data to a database. The data recorded by the tool includes the following: length of time the extension rang before being answered; length of time the customer waited in the ACD queue before reaching an agent; number of times the customer was placed on hold and the total amount of time spent on hold; length of time the agent was idle; number of times other agents were conferenced in the call; length of time the agent is handling an incoming call; length of time the agent is making an outgoing call and length of time the agent identification performing other work, such as entering wrap-up data.
The positive or negative quality of these factors affects customer satisfaction. Using the reporting tool to monitor these factors enables one to continuously modify call centre operations to meet and exceed customer demands. However, the reports generated only use the network information from the switch (PBX) to update a call log with telephony event times. As such the management information generated from this single source is of limited use. In this specification it is recognized that information from other sources needs to be combined with the telephony event information to produce useful reports for the efficient management of the system. In particular the availability of CLI/ANI (caller line identification/automatic number identification) information from the telephone network for certain applications may vary. If only a fraction of calls have ANI associated with them then the ability to automatically pop the customers account details when the agent answers the call is limited. This leads to longer call handling times and higher costs as the call centre has to employ a larger number of agents and incur higher network charges when the call centre is paying for the call. A remedy that the call centre manager may then consider is to introduce a VRU (voice response unit) which answers all the customer""s calls and prompts the customer for their account numbers before transferring the call to an available agent. Furthermore the availability of the correct telephone numbers in the host database holding the customers records may vary. If the customer database on the host computer does not have the correct telephone number stored in it then it will not be possible to identify the customers account and pop the screen automatically. In this case there are several possible actions the call centre could take to improve the situation. It may be that the database needs xe2x80x98cleaningxe2x80x99, that is removing separator characters in the telephone numbers or taking account of a country s number plan characteristics, for instance, ensuring that all numbers start with xe2x80x9801xe2x80x99 in the UK. It may be that the customer is calling in from a number of different phones and that database records need extending to hold more telephone number fields. Also by looking at business statistics associated with a call, for example, the revenue associated with a call or the business purpose of call, the call centre manager can acquire a unique insight into the call centre operation and allows him to modify his business processes to improve the call centre operation.
This specification proposes a monitor application that will collect the information from the various diverse sources and present it to the call centre manager in a way that will enable him to measure the performance of the CTI solution, identify any short comings, monitor the effect of any changes and forecast future trends.
In one aspect of the invention there is provided a method of monitoring the performance of a CTI enabled business application for a call centre comprising the steps of: acquiring telephony network information from the telephony network when a telephone call is made to the call centre; searching for information stored by the business application and associated with the telephony network information at the beginning of the call is made; and storing said business information with said telephony information such that the telephony information and existing business information are combined.
In another aspect of the invention there is provided a method of monitoring the performance of a CTI enabled business application for a call centre comprising the steps of: acquiring telephony network information from the telephony network when a telephone call is made to the call centre; searching for information associated with the call which is stored by the business application during the call; and storing said business information with said telephony information such that the telephony information and business information are combined. The monitor application has several sources of information: a database containing parameters that describe the call centre environment (configuration database); a database containing parameters that describe which reports are required and the format they are to be presented in (report parameter database); a customer database for each of the CTI applications (host application custom database); the telephony event information from the switch for all the CTI enabled agents in the call centre (call log database); the reports and historical data generated from previous runs of the monitor application (archive database). The monitor application will produce output that is generally graphical in nature as this will reveal patterns and trends. The output can either be displayed at a workstation 14 or in printed form. There will also be the ability to compare information with: the previous number of days; the same day of previous weeks; the same day in the same week of the previous months; and the weekly/monthly/yearly average.
The following list gives an example of the type of information presented.
Abandoned call statistics: the time the call was abandoned; the length of time the call was queued before the customer abandoned; if CLI/ANI information was associated with the call; the number of attempts any one customer made; the number of abandoned calls that were eventually answered; and the number of calls that overflowed between any two ACD group.
Intelligent Answering statistics: the percentage of calls that produced a single hit on the customer databases; a file containing information for those calls were CL/ANI information was available but a customer record was not found. This file can be used at a later date to correct the customer databases.
Transferred calls: transferring group and agent; disposition code for transferred calls; length that the customer was on hold; and duration of transferred call. Telephony statistics: average time to answer a call; worst case time to answer a call; average and worst case for the length of time the customer was on put on hold; and statistics on out of hours calls.
Business statistics: average revenue per call; revenue against length of call; and call disposition statistics.